COMMENT George Orwell said all big schemes for the socio-economic development of people inevitably fail, an opinion Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah agrees with going by his pronouncement of the New Economic Policy’s failure at the launch of the book Rich Malaysia Poor Malaysians in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.

The Umno MP for Gua Musang, whose disquisitions on national issues in recent years have marked him out as a dissenter within a party composed of local equivalents of the Vienna Boys Choir, was speaking at the Sultan Sulaiman Club at the launch of a book of essays by political commentator, Anas Alam Faizli.

Anas’ essays explore the gap between the bottom 40 percent of Malaysian households, overwhelmingly bumiputera, and the rest of the population in which the top tier of earners enjoy purchasing power that is 18 to 20 times more than those in the bottom quintile.

Considerable irony inhered in the location of the book’s launch.

Sultan Sulaiman Club was the venue where more than two score Malay bodies resolved in 1946 to band together to form the United Malays National Organisation (Umno).

This is the conglomerate that became the political vehicle for the launch in 1971 of a scheme of social engineering (NEP) that is now adjudged to be a failure, even by those like Tengku Razaleigh, who were its initial catalysts.

Treadmill of human failings

“Make no mistake about the NEP,” Razaleigh qualified. He held that the “philosophy and thought underpinning this piece of social engineering programme is just and noble” but like all plans that are nobly intentioned, not exempt from the law of unintended consequences.

The latter’s effects ranged from profligacy to rent-seeking, from patronage to corruption - all of which reinforced by the self-perpetuating cartels and coteries that came into play as a result of a good scheme gone putrid.

Nothing of what the longest-serving MP in the Malaysia’s Parliament said yesterday was different to what he disbursed at the Perkasa annual general meeting last December, where the Kelantan prince plainly told the right wing group that they were barking up the wrong tree in clamouing for more governmental solicitude for Malay socio-economic rights.

Tengku azaleigh admonished Perkasa that Malay socio-economic betterment was in greater need of qualitative upgrades, rather than quantitative inputs.

The same advice may be accorded the disburser.

Perhaps the next time Tengku Razaleigh holds forth on the same subject, it would improve the quality of his presentation if he offered some insight on how the insistent political forces clamouring for Malay advancement from the late 1960s onwards could have been beguiled with a scheme that sought to appease their urgencies without too great a cost to meritocracy.

Tengku Razaleigh was not one of Umno’s ‘Young Turks’ who bayed for the ouster of slowcoach prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman (right) and his replacement by the kinetic pace of Abdul Razak Hussein, but he was sympathetic to them.

That sympathy, in the intervening years of inevitable regret at those forces’ impetuousness, must yield some insight, perhaps, on how they could have been diverted from their stridency by a plan that sought economic redress for the Malays at not too great a cost to social equity.

As things stand now, as Anas testifies and Razaleigh concurs, what progress the NEP has brought is mirage-like and what should have resembled equity within the Malay race and them vis-à-vis the others has mutated into grand larceny by the few against the many.

A grotesquerie, surely.


TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades now. He likes the profession because it keeps him in touch with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.